Key Findings From 750,000+ Tech Job Listings

The technology job market is constantly evolving. Hence, it is critical for recruiters and hiring managers to keep tabs on the employment landscape and trends. Job boards and aggregators are great sources of labor market data as the metadata from jobs posted by various companies can be analyzed to generate insights. In this study, we extracted data from the job listings on popular technology-focused job boards to find key insights with respect to job type, company, skills, location and more.

Below are the data points we extracted from the job posts:

Company

Job title

Job description

Skills

Location

Employment type

We extracted data from more than 750,000 job listings across all major U.S. cities. Now let’s look at the key findings.

The Most In-Demand Job Titles

It’s not surprising that ‘developers’ and ‘engineers’ have the highest number of listings. We can also see that analysts, managers, and architects are other coveted jobs. It’s interesting to note that a 20-year-old technology like Java is still in high demand. Coming back to the third most in-demand job, ‘analyst,’ we further analyzed the term and found out it is most frequently associated with job titles such as business analyst, system analyst and data analyst. Among the top 15 job titles listed above, consultant, administrator, security, support and network are in the bottom five. It’d be worthy to mention that when it comes to consultants, SAP, Oracle and technical consultants are the top three titles. Top job titles related to data include data analyst, data engineer and big data.

Recruitment Agencies with the Most Number of Job Listings

After removing terms like ‘inc’, ‘corporation’, ‘technology’, etc. We were able to identify the recruitment agencies, staffing agencies and corporates with the most number of listings. Cybercoders (recruitment firm) and Robert Half (staffing agency) are the firms with the most number of job posts. Northrop Grumman, a global aerospace and defense technology company, stands as the top recruiter among corporates followed by Deloitte. Other notable staffing and recruitment agencies are Kforce, Judge Group and TEKsystems.

The Most Frequently Used Words in Job Descriptions

Here is the word cloud of the terms used in the job description for developers and engineers. We can see that words such as ‘experience,’ ‘skill,’ ’year,’ ’software,’ ’team,’ ’design’ are frequently used. If we compare the words used in the job description of analysts, it reveals that apart from words like ‘experience,’ ’skill,’ ‘year’ other words like ‘business,’ ‘requirement’ and ‘management’ are prevalent.

Top Skills for Engineers and Analysts

This is the table of top 15 skills associated with job listings for developers/engineers and analysts. We can see that the top five skills for developers are ‘java,’ ‘linux,’ ‘python,’ ‘C’ and ‘SQL’. In the case of analysts, top skills are management, business expertise (functional knowledge) and SQL. An important takeaway is that ‘SQL’ is important for both developers and analysts. Other common skills are related to data and agile methodology. The presence of ‘AWS’ signifies that there is demand for engineers in the cloud space.

Top Locations for Technology Jobs

It’s expected that California would house the most number of jobs because of to the dominance of the San Francisco technology market. That’s quite evident from the chart given above; San Francisco has more tech jobs than any other state. Apart from California, other important states for tech job seekers are Texas, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Illinois. Further analysis shows that the jobs that require ‘Java’ as a skill are mostly present in California, New York and New Jersey.

Employment Type

This chart shows that the highest number of job listings are for full-time employees, followed by contractual employees (includes independent contacts, corp-to-corp, contract-to-hire). It can be noted that there are a significant number of job posts for W2 employees (i.e. employees whose taxes are withheld by the employer and reported to the IRS. Further analysis shows that 6-month contracts have more occurrence than 12-month contracts.

Takeaways

Analysis of listings from job boards shows that in the tech market, apart from developers/engineers, there are significant opportunities for analysts. In spite of being an old technology, Java is still in demand. Cybercoders, Robert Half and Northrop Grumman are the three most dominant recruiters. While the top skills for developers are Java, Linux, Python and SQL, analysts are expected to be adept at management and functional knowledge, along with SQL. The three most important states for tech job seekers are California, Texas and New York. In terms of employment type, full-time employees are more in demand, in comparison to contractual employees.

Notes:

The job listings used for analyses were posted during the period 01/01/2017 to 02/24/2017